If we did not appreciate it before, we do now. The course we are on is a practical and vocational one. Beyond the reflective journal, the skills sessions and the written assignments, we need to get out there and counsel. The requirement of the course is that we each, as trainee practitioners, experience and record 150 client sessions over the two years. A list of approved providers was supplied at the beginning of the course and we have all, eventually, attached ourselves to schools, colleges, health trusts, GP surgeries, women’s shelters, rehabilitation centres – and begun our ministry.

And immediately we are face to face with a fundamental concern of the trainee counsellor: we are being sent out to deal, by definition, with people in real crisis – vulnerable, often profoundly damaged people. I have no doubt that we all carry Kitchener’s moral principles close to our hearts and aim consistently to dispense beneficence. But who is checking up on us? And what might happen if we get it wrong?

To compare our situation to other trainees: if a novice hairdresser gives me a bad haircut, it will grow out; a junior doctor is accompanied on her ward rounds by a senior; surgical students practise on cadavers – a truly victimless regime; even the infantry get target practice before they are sent to shoot at real people. (I have studied enough of the good Austrian to know that there are no accidents: in making this analogy, do I see counselling as a war zone?)

The point is that the very thing that is at the heart of most counselling – the one-to-one relationship – leaves both the student counsellor and his/her client very exposed. And whilst badly cut hair grows back, spoken words are unruly and ungovernable and cannot be unsaid. If I make an unwise or even potentially damaging intervention, I do not have the option of taking it back.

There are, of course, safeguards. We have college tutors, the supervision group, our external supervisor, lines of referral, the line manager in the placement who has screened our client in the first place, but even with the assurance of all these safety nets, we will almost certainly come across people and issues that feel beyond our capability. Even when a client has been screened and the presenting issue has been recorded, time with that client may reveal that they have presented an ‘acceptable’ issue because the ‘real’ issue is beyond their fathom and is far more complex and intense.

The first arm of the placement dilemma is this – the wish to be safe, at least harmless, the worry that good intentions and a little knowledge may not be enough to allow us to be consistently beneficent and that there is no expert in the counselling room to police us. But there is another, darker arm…

I recently re-watched the film Capote. Briefly, Truman Capote is writing In Cold Blood, the novelised account of a true murder and its perpetrators. Capote befriends Perry Smith, one of the ‘cold blooded’ killers. He becomes Smith’s advocate and earns him a stay of execution for the crimes he has admitted to. But Smith is then on death row, for a year, two… six years after Capote started writing. Capote is torn because until Smith is executed, he cannot finish his book. Secretly, running as an undercurrent to his regard for Smith, is a selfish desire to pursue his own career as a writer, to which end he is prepared to see Smith hanged.

Whilst this is an unduly melodramatic analogy, there is something similar going on for the would-be counsellor. Alongside the anxiety that we might offer bad counsel, is the insistence that we get to do it. Already, the expedient strand we might need to survive this profession is apparent. Whilst we might wring our hands at the thought of under- or over- or mis-directing a client, we are also willing them into the counselling room so that we can rack up the hours. The cautious sensibility is overruled by the urge to get on – ‘I could make 75 hours by Easter. What percentage of DNAs (Did Not Attends) are we allowed to count?’ In thrall to the rubric and requirements of matriculation, clients turn into hours clocked.

I refer back to the beloved core conditions. I hope this dark pragmatism does not affect my empathy. I am quite convinced I am doing well with congruence: this is how it is.


 

Names and details have been changed to protect identities